This is just a concept I came up with for a character’s backstory, they’re basically trapped in a room with their arm missing and they have to make sure they don’t go into shock. My main intention for this piece was to create a visual story with an element of mystery. I figured that having less items in the room meant that they didn’t remember much from the event but I tried to make the room look as isolated as possible.
Especially considering my lack of experience in perspective drawing, I drew the layout of the room before creating a digital piece.
I used guidelines from the vanishing point at the centre of the canvas to give me an idea on how the room would be laid out. The window with the blood marks was initially the room’s wall; however I wanted to bring the room closer as I was trying to make the room as claustrophobic as possible. Afterwards, I started working on the digital version, although looking back on the rough sketch, there were some issues with some of the angles of the objects.
I wanted to create an unsettling scene, like it’s been plucked out of a memory so I wanted to make the room as dark as possible. However, this caused some of the close objects (such as the sofa) to blend in with the flooring, making it harder to see.
The lighting in the room was created through the multiply and shading filters but also through painting with the shadows highlighting the lines in the room. However, in retrospective, I should’ve add more lighting coming from the windows so you could see more of the items in the room since the sofa is very hard to distinguish from the dark panelling.
The background of the image conveys the setting of the piece: A city, showing that despite being in a populated area, you can still feel isolated within the room, especially in dangerous situations.
To create the distorted effect for the room, I used the paint tool to blend the shadows and the lineart together so the room was essentially surrounded by darkness. The blood, however, was intentionally made brighter with a luminous effect in order to draw attention to the window and the pool of blood on the ground.